jayteeto,

Mrs PD bought an Ipod from the Apple store at the Millenia Mall, FL in Feb this year and the tax was 6%.

PD

Ta, any apple store worldwide will deal with faults so its a go still at 6%

Can't you claim the tax back at the airport ?

Agree re VPN reliability on 3G. Proper pain to have to constantly reconnect.

On jailbroken devices you can install stunnel, which allows you to connect like this:

iPad Client App -> localhost:12345 -> SSL tunnel -> server:54321 -> localhost:3389

Completely transparent, on-the-fly encryption with PKI access control (ie. only certs cut from the CA referenced by the server will be allowed to initiate an SSL connection).

The guff referenced above re Java/ActiveX is in regard to "clientless" VPNs (Citrix Access Gateway is a good example) which use a browser plugin instead of a standalone client.

Indeed, you are quite correct.

Re:1 ... My favourite tool of the moment for that sort of thing is TeamViewer....
Re:2 ... Agreed.
Re:3 ... I believe you're thinking about UPNP or similar

True, although most have the option to mandate encrypted comms.

Two factor authentication. Then even if your "password" leaks in plaintext, it's single-use only and only valid for 60 seconds or so anyway.

Agree with you on the latter,but not the former.

Would be tempted to point out that even on the latter, it's not the VPN that's at fault but the network technology.

VPNs are great. Although you'll generally get best stability from hardware implementations rahter than software on your local machine. Boxes such as Juniper's firewalls can ping and automatically reconnect to an alternate VPN endpoint if the primary goes down with minimal downtime.

It also depends what your VPN is connected on and to. If it's a flaky, rate limited, packet shaped ADSL connection then of course you'll have issues.

Personally I'd take IPSec VPNs over SSL VPNs any day ! :cool:

You are correct about Verizon as they don't actually have a sim card, it's built in. AT&T Ipad's are not locked to that sim card. I have purchased 3 of them from the USA, no problems with any.

Jayteeto..... you have to ask yourself if its worth buying without a 3G connection. When you get back home you can get a PAYG sim card.

Mutt

I stand corrected about AT & T, and no you can not claim the tax back, there are only a couple of states in the US where you can, but not Florida.

IOS 5
 

Released today (afaik). In the process of downloading it, extremely interested in seeing how iMessage works, could this be a Blackberry Message replacement?

Mutt

It was actually released as an update on the 12th, the iPhone 4S was released today (14th).

I downloaded an installed on the 12th, and thankfully didn't suffer any of the problems some people experienced with the extremely busy servers timing out. It take 3 hours to do my iPhone 4, but the iPad and the wife's iPhone 4 were a lot quicker.

Quite a nice update:
(a) I like being able to get to the camera from the lock screen, and being able to use the volume + button for the shutter. Incidentally it is possible to use the volume + button on the headset too. So some enterprising people could surely wire things up for long distance remote shutter release.
(b) Notification centre is a huge improvement. When you have a lot of apps using notifications in iOS4, having to clear down dozens of notifications before being able to use the phone for anything was a tad annoying. You couldn't go back and see what notices there were, as once they were dismissed they were gone forever.
(c) Remote syncing and backup over Wifi is great too. When I go to bed, I plug the phone in to recharge, and it looks for my Mac and starts to backup automatically. I don't have to remember to periodically connect the thing to iTunes and back it up.

There's quite a few changes in there, but I'll let people discover some for themselves.

In the meantime iOS5 will tide me over until my contract finishes and I can decide whether to go for an iPhone 4S or hold out longer for an iPhone 5.

jayteeto,

Though I suspect they are price-fixed by Apple - you could see if Walmart have any offers on the I-Pad when you're there? We got PD Jnr a super saving on an Acer laptop from Walmart (the one behind Medieval Times on the 192) a few years ago and when I asked about any warranty issues they said not a problem - just take it to your local Asda or contact Acer UK!

One thing to be aware of AT&T's 3G frequency channel is not the same as the 3G channel used in the UK etc.
I have this problem when I use my BB in the UK with a local PAYG Sim - it has to step down to a lower common denominator (less speed).

Also - don't you have to declare the goods on entry to the UK as it is more than 300 pounds in value?

Things were quite busy yes.

The graph below is not from the download site, but from downstream somwhere in europe. See the lonely spike on the graph on the Wednesday ? That's the IOS5 downloaders doing their stuff... imagine multiplying this by X locations and you can only guess how busy Apple (or more likely Akamai) was !

http://www.lonap.net/mrtg/lonap-total-week.png





(For people visiting this thread in a month's / year's etc. time, the above graph will be irrelevant as it is a weekly graph and so will have been refreshed .... so if you visit this thread after Week 41 of 2011, you won't understand what I'm on about !).

iPad 2 + iTunes any need for a PC?
 

"Am I missing something?" he asked naively.

If I have iTunes downloaded onto my iPad why do I still need to use my PC to sync and update/download things - wifi or not?

You can download APPs directly, or magazines books music etc..... However following the release of IOS5 you can now backup your Ipad to a cloud which gets away from having to use a computer at all. A new Ipad2 will start and work without ever syncing with a PC.

Nice touch.

Mutt

Thanks Mutt, I get that. What I don't understand is why the iTunes wifi sync needs my pc to be available. Surely if I download iTunes onto the iPad I can sync it directly? Or would that be too simple?!

Lord Spandex Masher,

Sounds like you're getting your spandex in a twist for no reason.

WiFi sync and iCloud are two separate things. It sounds like you're getting them confused.

My understanding (from reading stuff, have not yet had a chance to experiment) is that WiFi Sync is there simply to give you the possibility to replace the need for a USB cable. Hence it's obvious that you need iTunes on a PC to use it !

iCloud is the whole backup/download thing based in the Apple cloud, and that, by the sound of things, is what you should be looking at.

My understanding is that it is Apple's goal is to move away from the PC/Mac iTunes requirement towards a cloud model, where everything is pushed to/from a cloud. So even if what you want in terms of functionality is not available right now (considering they've only just publicly launched the cloud), it will be available reasonably soon.

Thanks for all the replies, you have been very helpful. I plan to give the 3G a miss because I can get a MiFi hub from 3mobile that will work with my laptop as well. The customs and excise website quotes a figure of £390 of other goods including perfume. The saving will only be about 40 quid, but that's better in my pocket. Apple warranties and backup are worldwide, I've already been there!!

The 3G version has the real GPS. That is very useful, for many people. I would not buy the non-3G Ipad.

Location-based services on the wi-fi only model may be a bit ropey in the UK, since it has no GPS: it relies on the quality of the wifi location database for positioning. I'd probably go for the 3G version: even without putting a SIM card in to enable 3G, you still have access to the GPS features of the 3G chipset (apart from the "a" in "a-GPS").

I think the key to helping Lord Spandex Masher is to explain that iTunes on the Mac or PC is NOT the same as iTunes on the iPad. The Mac/PC iTunes can do pretty much everything the iPad iTunes can, but not vice versa.

Updating my iPhone took about 45 min - 1hr. Mostly painless - a couple of issues wondering where some music had gone and some duplicated files / apps but basically just needed to check which boxes were checked / unchecked in Settings. As usual many of the changes are things that intuition sorts out - simple example - the way the phone 'zooms' now.

Somewhere in Europe.......being somewhere in Docklands employing a certain person? ;)

Go on, tell me you were downloading it to update your myriad of Apple merchandise ;)

(although I must admit I like the idea of the iWatch)

No, I know I'd get thrown off the PPRuNe gangplank for doing that ! ;)

The graph is from the Docklands, yes, but it's from it's one of the peering points there (LONAP). Of which a company with which I am involved is a member, and I also know one of the LONAP directors well.

Other than that, per PPRuNe policy, my lips are sealed. :cool:

I know.... sometimes I reckon I ought to get more closely involved with Apple just to benefit from a discount perk.

Anyhow, I'm vendor agnostic.... for example, my current phone is a Blackberry, not an iPhone. (Although I am HATING the Blackberry with all its bugs etc !)

Does IOS5 do anything about the behaviour of WIFI versus GPRS/3G, where if the signal levels are both fairly weak, it can't quite decide which one to use, and the result is long disconnections / IP changes etc which terminate VPN etc connections, web sessions, cause pprune to log out ;) etc.

The Apple-suggested fix is to disable one or the other, manually.

Windoze doesn't have this problem. If you have both WIFI and 3G concurrently, both connected, it seems to prioritise them so WIFI gets used all the time it is present.

I also read in some US forum that IOS 5 wipes all application config. Is that true?

"I also read in some US forum that IOS 5 wipes all application config. Is that true?"

Not in my case - upgraded in about an hour / hour and a half, mostly due to 22Gb of music transferred.

All apps / configs worked as they have before the upgrade.

ios5 gives you the option of backing up from itunes or icloud. (That's if you backed your iphone before you downloaded it)

I've also read that icloud crashes when uploading content to it. I'll leave well alone until that's sorted. Probably because iphone users were uploading at once on the 12th Oct.

The upgrade went OK for me too.

However, I still cannot get HDMI output working. It worked (via a 3rd party Ipad to HDMI adaptor) for about half an hour, then stopped. A different adaptor did not help and neither did the firmware upgrade. There is a fair amount of stuff on google about this, but no solutions. There is no obvious config on the Ipad which might control whether the screen (Iplayer etc) is copied to HDMI or not.

A different Mac problem.

I had BBC Iplayer Desktop working well on my MacBook Pro, including the thing where it downloads programmes that I wanted to watch rather than streaming them. And then it completely stopped working. I got the "unexpectedly quit" message and that has been the end of it. I went through the uninstall, and reinstall process, including uninstalling Adobe Air (which is the core of the iplayer system as I understand it), and still I only get the "unexpectedly quit" message.

I have OSX Lion installed, as it was when I first downloaded desktop about two weeks ago, and I haven't changed anything about the os, or the configuration since then so am at rather a loss to understand the problem or correct it. Any suggestions will be welcomed! the only explanation that I can think of is that (there might have been) an update to Adobe Air which Iplayer desktop and OSX Lion are not ready for in some way.

Can you consistently replicate the unexpected quits, or is it an occasional/intermittent problem ?

If consistent, open up Application -> Utilities -> Console and watch that for messages that come up at the time when you get the unexpected quits.

The fault is consistent, Mixture. There is a very long list of codes and fault messages, and a caption that says that the problem message is forwarded to Apple, os I think that I will just have to wait a while for it to be fixed. I will try another clean install in a week or so and see if things have been solved.

I can still stream programmes which really is fine. I will be back in the UK soon so will be able to record them on the DVD recorder at home in the normal way.

Having done a bit f reading about the problem I think it is a problem with the Adobe update of AIR to 3.0 which doesn't work with OSX 10.7 It has been nearly 2 months since the problem appeared, and it would seem that I am not the only person having a problem, but it seems strange that adobe haven't got to work on it. Never mind!

Otherwise loving the Mac life :)

Mac Time Machine & WD backup problem solved - tip
 

Mac backing up to WD World Edition automagically with Time Machine over network. Has worked fine for ages.
Casually had a look - no backups done for 2/12!!!

Time Machine simply says “Making backup disk available”, then silently stops doing anything.

It is caused by a broken database for the timemachine share, SSH into the box and issue the command: rm -rf /DataVolume/.timemachine/.AppleDB

You may need to repair the sparsebundle afterwards - no big deal.

WD World Edition NAS + Time Machine = "Making backup disk available"

“Making backup disk available” taking forever – Time Capsule Solution! » chimac.net – Stuff worth knowing about

WD_Backup share not available (TimeMachine looking... - Western Digital Community

Mac :ok:

PS: What happened to the Mac thread?

PPS: There are various esoteric problems with the WD MyBook that require quite a bit of command-line magic to solve. Better solution is to dig out an old PC, and use FreeNAS ( FreeNAS 8 | Storage For Open Source ).

As a side note, I've found certain hard drives need a firmware upgrade before they will reliably work with time machine.

This is nothing to do with Apple, but due to the fact that some drive manufacturers enable a sleep mode on their drives.... and hence drives can disconnect from the host computer in the midst of a backup if they suddenly form the opinion that they've been inactive.


Mac users never have any problems, that's why the thread is so quiet. :E

Or you could just buy a better hard drive in the first place....:E

Good gps for iPad for the uk?
 

Any one recommend me a good gps for my ipad for the uk please?

GPS is a worldwide standardised signal, therefore anything you consider "good" in your home country will also be good in the UK.

I presume the OP is referring to GPS software for the iPad. Whilst I have no experience with other GPS software available for iDevices, I am quite pleased with the TomTom app for Europe (which includes the UK, whoopee!).

It's a bit pricey for some tastes but one as long as one uses the same Apple ID it can be used on iPhone, iPod and iPad. Personally, I use the it on the iPhone for walking routes (and occasionally in hire cars, since my car has an OEM unit). With a suitable vehicle mount, the iPad would probably be quite satisfactory in a vehicle.

If you own a Wifi Ipad and wish to have GPS data, Buy a Dual XGPS150.

Connects via Bluetooth. Excellent GPS coverage.

I have a 3g iPad ..(ie built in GPS) but use the Dual GPs inflight with the receiver stuck on a non heated window....reception (and iPad battery life) is much better
Details from

Wireless extenders and Ipads
 

I run ADSL through a D-Link DSL-G604T router/modem, and to this router, I have connected a wireless extender system that distributes the signal through the mains around my home.

Although my i-phone has discovered the extended wireless network and connects to it, my ipad won't. It sees the wireless network as available, but prompts for a password. Neither the password for my wireless network, nor any other password used on my network will allow it to connect.

Needless to say, I have tried resets of the network, the router and the Ipad, but to no avail. I suspect that this is something simple to resolve, but it has me beaten!

Any suggestions would be most welcome.

Did you just hit <Enter> when prompted for the password?

Good thought! Unfortunately, the "join" button is greyed out until after eight digits have been entered.